WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Three swimmers from the Upper Valley Aquatic Club signed to compete with NCAA schools at a Saturday morning ceremony, committing to continue their competitive careers for another four years.
Cailey Stockwell, of Hopkinton, N.H., and Will Kainen, of White River Junction, both signed National Letters of Intent with Division I institutions, with Stockwell heading to Fairfield University in Connecticut and Kainen going much farther afield to California State University-Bakersfield. Brandy Lewis, of Strafford, will be staying closer to home, swimming for Division III Colby-Sawyer College in New London.
Lewis has been swimming competitively with UVAC for 12 years and specializes in the sprint freestyle events. She attended The Sharon Academy but is now living on campus at Vermont Technical College as a full-time student in an early college program.
Even though she will arrive at Colby-Sawyer with a year of college credit already under her belt, Lewis still plans to spend four years there so she can balance academics — she intends to go into nursing — with swimming. Lewis had a few options to swim at the Division I level, at the University of Vermont and the University of Rhode Island, but wanted to have more time to study outside the pool.
“It would have been nice to do that, but it takes away a lot from your academics,” Lewis said. “Just this year, being a college student at 17, I’ve realized how much work it is. I want it to be fun and not necessarily all swimming.”
Stockwell and Kainen evaluated things differently.
Kainen joined UVAC at age 7, but he enrolled at Suffield Academy, a boarding school in Connecticut, in his sophomore year. He would come home on select weekends and school breaks to train with his club team in addition to competing with the team at Suffield. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he spent his junior year in Vermont and returned to UVAC.
One of Kainen’s top priorities in his recruiting process was to go somewhere warm — schools on his radar included the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., University of Tampa, University of North Carolina-Wilmington and even Louisiana State University. He chose Bakersfield because he enjoyed the team culture when he visited and because the school has a strong program in his intended major of kinesiology, although the outdoor facility sure didn’t hurt.
“I’m getting kind of sick of the cold,” Kainen said. “A big percentage of the team were also kinesiology majors. Bakersfield was one of the schools I saw first, and once I kept going on more visits, it just stuck in my head.”
Until the pandemic started, Stockwell belonged to the YMCA in Concord, much closer to her Hopkinton home. But the pool there is much smaller than the UVAC facility, which reopened considerably earlier, so Stockwell and her family decided the lengthy commute was worth it.
Stockwell’s older sister, Sydney, currently swims at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, so Cailey had a good sense of the recruiting process before going through it. But she said switching clubs was a game-changer for her — Scott Ellis and the other coaches at UVAC had her swimming much more than she had at Concord.
“The yardage went up so much,” Stockwell said. “I was going from around 3,000 yards in only an hour and a half, and now we’re getting from 5,000 to 6,000 yards in two hours. It’s a lot more technique and race-pace work.”
The three swimmers’ commitments became official on Saturday, and in a statement posted by the UVAC, Ellis called them “the latest examples of the high-quality swimmers that our program has produced.”
Stockwell, a newcomer compared to Lewis and Kainen, said she was glad to be signing alongside her teammates even though she is not a UVAC lifer.
“It’s been really nice to get to know them,” Stockwell said. “After I switched last year, I’ve gotten really close with both of them. It’s cool to go through the experience together.”
Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.